Houston, Dallas Students Take Top Honors in Statewide Holocaust Writing/Art Competition

HOUSTON, TX (April 25, 2006) – Four students from the Houston area and three from Dallas have been named as winners of the 2006 YomHaShoah statewide art and writing competition.

The contest is held annually to help middle and high-school students across Texas learn more about the atrocities of the Holocaust during World War II and is timed to coincide with the international commemoration of YomHaShoah, a day of remembrance for the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust.

Some of the winners were on hand on Monday, April 24, 2006, during Houston’s citywide YomHaShoah ceremony at Congregation Beth Yeshurun, 4525 Beechnut St. Almost 900 people attended the ceremony.

YomHaShoah corresponds annually to the historical beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943.

As part of this year’s activities, students submitted art projects and essays reflecting the theme "From Liberation to the Pursuit of Justice: Nuremberg 1945 to Today." Topics included war crimes, the Nuremberg trials, the search for perpetrators, the fates of former Nazi leaders, and lessons learned or still to be learned from the Holocaust.

In the art competition, Ivan Perez, a ninth-grader at North Shore High School in Galena Park, took first place, and Ilse Deleon, a 10-grader at the same school, took second place.

In the middle-school division, Anna Baxter, a student at the Episcopal School of Dallas, took first place; Sara Rebecca Ferris of The Emery/Weiner School in Houston took second place, and Adrienne Gehan of the Episcopal School of Dallas took third place. All three are in the eighth grade.

In the writing competition, Jacob Lipman of the Robert M. Beren Academy of Houston took first place, and second place went to Avigail Ruderman of the Mesorah High School for Girls in Dallas.

First-place winners in each category received $100, second-prize winners received $75, and third-prize winners were awarded $50.

The competition was underwritten by the David Barg Endowment Fund, the Houston Council of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, Second Generation and the Texas Coalition for Holocaust Education.

Sponsors included Holocaust Museum Houston, the Dallas Holocaust Museum, the El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center, the Holocaust Memorial of San Antonio, the Jewish Federation of Fort Worth and Tarrant County and the North Texas/Oklahoma and Southwest Regional Offices of the Anti-Defamation League.

This year’s Houston YomHaShoah commemoration was coordinated by the YomHaShoah Steering Committee, chaired by Lea Weems and Pepi Joskowitz Nichols and underwritten by The Morgan Family Endowment Fund and other community sponsors.

Holocaust Museum Houston is free and open to the public and is located in Houston’s Museum District at 5401 Caroline St., Houston, TX 77004.

For more information about the student competition or Holocaust Museum Houston, call 713-942-8000 or visit www.hmh.org.

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All requests for interviews or on-site photography or videography by members of the media must be coordinated in advance through our Public Relations office by calling 713-942-8000, ext. 103 or e-mailing news@hmh.org.

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